The U.K.'s Growth Spurt Has Taken Economists Almost Entirely by Surprise

The global financial crisis has challenged some of the economic profession's most cherished assumptions. And no country has confounded the textbooks more than the curious case of the U.K.

For five years, the British economy has persistently failed to behave as predicted by theory—and continues to do so with increasing evidence it is growing faster than almost any other major Western economy.